San Antonio is currently the 14th fattest city in the United States, according to a recent study by WalletHub. This represents a substantial improvement, considering that San Antonio ranked second in 2014.
The study compared 100 of the most populous U.S. metro areas across 17 key indicators of weight-related problems.
San Antonio Chamber of Commerce Board Chairman Rad Weaver believes that local businesses have a hand in improving the overall health of the city, so he has declared wellness in the workplace to be one of his top priorities. The Wellness Connection at the Chamber is a new initiative aimed at educating businesses on how to create healthier workplaces by providing resources that encourage better employee health.
The initiative is a first for the city and an effort toward the overall goal of “getting San Antonio off the damn list” of fattest cities in the U.S., Weaver said.
“Health care and biosciences is [San Antonio’s] single largest industry,” Weaver said, noting that one in six residents work in that job sector. “We understand health care as a business, but the perception of San Antonio as an unhealthy city is bad for business.”
For its wellness initiative, the Chamber has partnered with the American Heart Association, which will provide local businesses with resources such as Workplace Health Solutions, an online platform that allows companies to analyze the effectiveness of their existing wellness plans. It also provides education and tools aimed at engaging employees and encouraging them to improve their health.
San Antonio is the flagship city for the American Heart Association’s workplace health solutions program. If successful, the organization plans to roll out the program nationwide.
Jennifer Meachum, the American Heart Association’s senior community health director, told the Rivard Report that this initiative is unique because of its specific focus on improving cardiovascular health.
“The reason why that is important is because heart disease is the No. 1 killer in America,” Meachum said. A healthy heart is associated with lower risk for disease and stroke. Additional benefits include reduced risk of cancer and cognitive decline, as well as improvements in quality of life, mental health, and productivity.
Companies may enroll to participate in a workplace health index, which measures comprehensive health in seven categories using aggregate employee data from the My Life Check, an online digital health assessment that provides an overall “heart health score.” Based on their score, employees are then directed to resources that help them improve that score.
Weaver, 42, said the health initiative has personal meaning to him because his father died at age 50. His dad was a “seemingly healthy, young guy [who was] educated and smart,” he said.
“Nicotine was the cause of his death,” Weaver said, adding that if his father had been more educated about the dangers of smoking or had been given the option of tobacco or a lifetime with his family, “it would have been an easy choice.”
“Our City Council has done a terrific job creating parks, creating an environment where people can exercise, be outside, and be active,” Weaver said. “Now it’s time that we as citizens take the initiative ourselves and do something.”
The Chamber’s role will be to help with awareness and education and provide tools for people and businesses to work toward improving health, Weaver said.
On Monday, Sept. 25, the Chamber will host an information session for businesses interested in building and maintaining a workplace wellness plan. During the session, the American Heart Association, Humana, and Baptist Healthy Solutions will share best practices on managing wellness and health in a business environment.
The event will take place at the Northside Business Center and is free and open to the public. To register, click here.
The Business Civic Leadership Center with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a health and wellness initiative that has been working to help companies nationally to address health and wellness issues in both the workplace and the community.
Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation concluded that worker productivity lost to diabetes, depression, poor cardiovascular health, and other chronic and preventable illnesses is estimated to reach $1.1 trillion annually in the U.S., and that implementing wellness programs provide a strong return on investment for employers and employees alike.
“Wellness affects everybody – small businesses [and] large businesses,” Weaver said. “We hope to be a resource for those who do not have resources. We want to open this up to the entire city of San Antonio.”
Mayor Ron Nirenberg told the Rivard Report that the Chamber’s initiative is asking businesses to challenge their own employees to adopt wellness and prevention strategies.
Nirenberg noted that 15% of San Antonio high school students are obese and 14% are overweight. For adults in San Antonio, 35% are obese and 35% overweight. He said that “while the numbers are staggering, there are positive things also,” and that San Antonio needs to consistently focus on improving its residents’ health.
“We are challenging businesses to make [health initiatives] part of their operations,” Nirenberg said. “It’s good for productivity, it’s good for the bottom line, and it’s better for overall community health, which benefits the entire city.”
why, everyone that you see at Fiestas etc…are mostly all fat
San Antonio definitely will gain good PR by being at the top of this list of healthy citirs rather the bottom. However, like many ‘best of/worst of” lists, the criteria is debatable. This list has McAllen being superior in terms of “healthy environment”. And Ive been to many other cities ranked substantially superior. I would not call New Orleans substantially superior. They dont cite their criteria.
being an overweight city has little to do with healthcare or access to healthcare – it’s more about education attainment, income equality, access to healthful foods, and whether or not you are in a walkable, bikeable city. create a city that is friendly to pedestrians, bikers and transit and you will see the obesity rates drop.
Is this a percentage of population ranking or a total number ranking?
I saw a list in the last five years published by Men’s Health Magazine that ranked San Antonio low in ‘health’ because we don’t have a lot of cardio kickboxing going on. Might as well say that we don’t have much inline skating going on either.
Beyond worrying about lists, I’d like for the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce to join Salud Today and other local groups in tackling San Antonio’s current built form as an obstacle to healthy living and economic development. I’d like for the Chamber to express an understanding that miles of separated bike lanes, better walking conditions and better mass transit are how cities and regions chase and retain industries, workers, visitors, retirees and other investors in 2017.
The SA Chamber’s Northside Business Center (1100 NW Loop 410 — in Castle Hills) is barely VIA accessible or walkable. It’s under 8 miles from the Alamo, but it is practically unbikeable due to the poor design and management of Blanco Road, San Pedro Avenue and Rector.
The VIA stops for the Northside Business Center lean towards the worst in the VIA network — do you really want to sit without shade by a 410 access road for a bus that runs only every half-hour? How about along Blanco Road?
I’d like for the SA Chamber to apply ‘damn’ to any other City or County action beyond worrying about a feeble marketing list from an untested start-up. As in, build some damn separated bike lanes on Blanco and San Pedro (we impress no company or industry with a $500k / 1.3mile commitment to bike lanes with a $2.7b FY2018 budget). Build damn shelters for the damn bus stops and/or move the damn bus stops to where they are safe and convenient for pedestrians. Get more San Antonio companies to offer VIA’s damn super discounted annual pass for workers and support VIA financially. Plant some damn street trees and lose some of the damn wasteful surface parking. Encourage damn mass transit innovators like Ford’s Chariot (in Austin) or Limebike (in Dallas) to at least test in San Antonio.
I hate the mentality suggested above that San Antonio has done a good job of’ ‘zoning’ our health to a few parks and luxury recreation centers like the Pearl or Topgolf that we can drive to if we just weren’t so lazy; at no point does the article mention VIA, walking and biking for health and transport. The SA Chamber should be furious about our damn lousy urban design and investments to date, and they could start by looking at and improving pedestrian conditions near their Northside Business Center.
Damn great reply, Mark 🙂
Along with more VIA routes and convenient scheduling (let’s go from a 1/2 cent to a full 1 cent of the tax, people!), do many of the businesses under Weaver’s purview offer meaningful and affordable health insurance? Having another person, y’know an MD as an authority figure, tell you on a consistent and following-up basis that you’re lifestyle needs changing, can do wonders I bet …
(plus, the health insurance premiums for both employer and individual can then go down, with those medically-verifiable wellness plans. Nothing like a shrinking bottom-line to shrink bottoms!)
@Bert What in damnation is your point about Fiesta partygoers? Everyone needs to blow off a little steam from their work and workout plan!
The SA Chamber should also note that we don’t even rank in the top 30 most ‘fun’ places in the U.S. in 2017 (we rank 32nd), as scored by (damn?) WalletHub. Somehow, we’re less fun than Omaha.
But looking at this WalletHub scoring, it becomes clear the category that weighs our score down (‘Entertainment and Recreation’) relates to pedestrian infrastructure, land use planning and equitable public parks spending — or walkable access to parks and playgrounds as well as to (open year round) public pools and public sports courts, hiking trails and bike rental/bikeshare facilities (we’re never going to rank high in skiing facilities or public beaches).
Some of these factors are calculated based on Parkscore, a newer measure that I have used (and the City should have used) to critique various recent public projects, policy changes, design proposals and budget decisions. For example, our new SATomorrow long range planning commits to improving our Parkscore, but our draft FY2018 budget did not. This year, our City’s equity lens completely missed or ignored Parkscore — or the belief that ‘everyone deserves a great park within a 10-minute walk of home’. A Parkscore analysis of the budget and various development proposals likely would have shifted priorities and sequences of work if not some spending and design requirements, positioning San Antonio for various better national rankings in FY2018.
Scoring by groups like WalletHub, The Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore (we rank 69th of 98 cities), Walk Score (by neighborhood; the Northside Business Center’s uptown loop neighborhood ranks poorly), the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s AllTransit score (San Antonio ranks very low for access to frequent and full day transit service currently) and the National Physical Activity Plan Alliance Annual Walking and Walkable Communities Report Card (Texas flunks out completely in 2017) demonstrate not that we have behavior issues (diet and exercise) as much as serious public infrastructure and spending/policy obstacles that hold us back — making us more unhealthy and less desirable as a U.S. tourism destination and knocking us out of consideration by some companies and industries.
Local economic development groups like the SA Chamber need to become experts very quickly on how to improve San Antonio’s overall score on various walkable community measures so they can advocate for as well as invest in community improvements that matter and position us above other cities in Texas.
To this end, the City needs a damn sidewalk master plan and ADA Pedestrian Transition Plan Update that the public has full access to (every damn year until the damn plan is achieved, as required by Federal law) — exceeding Austin’s (what Austin observes as a ‘fully compliant’ sidewalk width does not meet the 5 feet minimum width ADA passing standard, which is also the minimum sidewalk width recommendation – 5 feet – of various groups including AAMPO, NACTO, FTA, AARP and Safe Routes to School as well as the built norm in cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, etc., noting how Texas flunks national measures of walkable communities).
The City also needs a 2017 damn update (every damn year) to our Bicycle Master Plan, as well as a plan to improve frequent (at least every 15 minute) and full day (between 7am and 10pm) bus service for more than 7,400 damn residents, as currently estimated.
The City also needs to move us way DOWN the list in traffic speed related deaths (we rank 5th nationally), with a damn VisionZero / Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Plan that we work towards each budget. Fortunately AAMPO did this for us in 2016 (a volume of very specific street segment recommendations) — we just need to implement it.
Do the various national rankings each have their own biases? Sure — and the City and other groups should challenge biases as well as possible errors (I note some possible errors with San Antonio’s ParkScore) where they observe them.
But we won’t get better (or off the damn ‘fat’ lists or other negative rankings) with more pedometers, four feet wide and ADA inaccessible sidewalks or focusing spending and efforts where pedestrian qualities in San Antonio are already okay.
See:
2017’s Most Fun Cities in America
https://wallethub.com/edu/most-fun-cities-in-the-us/23455/
The Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore
http://parkscore.tpl.org/city.php?city=San%20Antonio#sm.0000b39quh85zdg7t9z1bmry8cn9e
Walk Score / Bike Score
https://www.walkscore.com/
The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s AllTransit score
http://alltransit.cnt.org/
The National Physical Activity Plan Alliance Annual Walking and Walkable Communities Report Card
http://www.physicalactivityplan.org/
City of Austin’s 2016 Sidewalk Master Plan and ADA Pedestrian Transition Plan Update
https://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Public_Works/Street_%26_Bridge/Sidewalk_MPU_Adopted_06.16.2016_reduced.pdf
National Speed Fatality Map (VisionZero Network)
http://visionzeronetwork.org/resources/speed-fatality-map/
Regional Bicycle & Pedestrian Planning Study (2016), Vol. 2. street segment recommendations for San Antonio
http://www.alamoareampo.org/Studies/